Bringing communities together - #BC LIVE SESSION 17 recap

October 1, 2018

Which community do you belong to?

During our last #BRAINCANDIES LIVE SESSION on the theme: “Bringing communities together” we actually brought communities together.

We are choosing themes that we think are very important to be discussed in an open environment with people from the most diverse backgrounds. The way we present it to our community and to the city in general it is rather simple. We pick a theme and we made the theme part of the title of our #BRAINCANDIES LIVE SESSION.

We tend to stick around with the people that have something in common with us. A group of people that share some common values, taste, interest or activity, can be called a community. What makes community different from other “getting together” of people is the sense of belonging. People that are part of the community, feel they belong to that community.

Bringing community together should part of the DNA of healthy cities. People from different communities have different background and often view of the world and it is important that people keep open dialogue to nurture a more creative and inclusive society. A city like Eindhoven, it is full of vibrant communities, some of them might be easy to define, some of them a bit more difficult. What a better way to bring communities together, to actually having a whole #BRAINCANDIES dedicated to the theme?

Since 17 SESSION of #BRAINCANDIES, we always try to improve our evenings, we always propose new wedoexperiences, new games and enjoying new ways of making our participants connect with each others as fast as possible.

We started off the session with a very funny and interesting wedoexperience. Participants were all invited on stage and were challenged to order themselves by birthday date..without talking. It was a lot of fun and it contributed to create a friendly and receptive atmosphere right from the start.

Our participants telling each other their birthday date without talking.

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So what were the different communities we brought together? When it comes to Eindhoven, the representative of the Design and Technology community where there. But we also have people representing the expat communities, the “mums” communities, and another high amount of “labels” that can be used to categorize our very diverse audience.

We like to bring people from the most diverse walks of life together.

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Another very interesting wedoexperience carried on by our host Cristian was a highly interactive activity where people from the audience (once again they were all invited on stage) had to randomly grab each other hands while being in a circle and had to do their best to untangle themselves to be finally able to form a circle.

During this wedoexperience, our audience had to untangle themselves and form a circle.

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After some nice moments of interaction and our usual introduction of the evening we introduced the first speaker.

Melissa was the first one. With her #BRAINCANDIES, Melissa, originally from the US, shared how difficult it was to settle in the Netherlands and how helpful was to first observe and then learn from her kid. His son, in fact made friends were easily with other kids, without even being able to understand each others language and let us all reflect on how we can learn from kids to connect with people in our surroundings in a more honest and, why not, fun way.

Melissa smiling after talking about how we can learn from children to connect with others.

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The second speaker was Andre’, also known as Drosha. Drosha is an experienced choreographer and dancer that has spent the last 10 years building HipHoplab040 (that now goes by the name of Urbanlab040), an initiative supported by Dynamo and Lumens Groups that let young talents develop themselves not only as artists but also as professionals in an environment that make young people from very different communities (HipHop, Poetry, FreeRunning, Tricking, Calisthenics) come together and learn from each other. Their philosophy is inspire, learn, work and it is all about empowering young people one step at the time, going through this very important steps.

Drosha showing the card-based exercise that he uses to make young people connect and learn more about themselves.

Our third inspiring speaker was Quetzi, a young Mexican woman, that started Mis Amores Tortilleria with a group of Mexican and Italian Friends. After buying one big tortilla making machine, Questzi and the Mis Amores crew started organizing food parties that brought together people from the Dutch and International community of Eindhoven. Quetzi reminded us our powerful food can be in bringing communities together.

Quetzi sharing her passion for Mis Amores Tortilleria.‍

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The fourth speakers was Koen Snoeckx, with his talk titled: “Community Colliders: where to find them and how to build them”. Koen is very passionate about bringing people actively working on building a better world together, in order to inspire each other and create new collaborations that are able to make bigger impact on the planet. Koen is passionate about facilitating those collision between changemakers in different fields and shared his experience on how to bring communities together, by building community colliders.

Koen posing in front of the audience after his powerful #BRAINCANDIES.‍

The last speakers of the evening was Jean-Paul Close, who shared with the audience the success story of, a network made of different communities tackling ways to improve to society different in area of focus but with the common goal to make society more resilient on an human side and on a resource side.

Jean-Paul close during his inspiring #BRAINCANDIES.

As usual, we also had a surprise speaker, Hans Kokhuis, who shared a beautiful story about creativity on how to keep ourselves open to experimentation, without becoming to rigid and not being able to ultimately fix those challenges we are so obsessed about.

Hans during his improvised #BRAINCANDIES.‍

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It was a very creative and positive session. Once again, we were happy to see our audience very happy and we really learned a lot about each other on how to bring communities together.

Till the next one!

Neil was given the chance to give a small presentation on “Bringing Communities Together” at the end of this #BRAINCANDIES LIVE SESSION.

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Here what are audience thought of our #BRAINCANDIES LIVE SESSION 17

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And here some things that our audience learned:

I have learned that I belong in this city!

Sharing with fun

Dare to share your experiences. We have more things in common to what we think

Sustainocracy as a new word to use

It is so easy to connect with people

New vocabulary

Energizer standing in a row without speaking

Share my ideas with other people... Better if they think different than me!

To view the world through the eyes of a child, it makes everything seem more possible.

People want to open up

colliders, not be a bee and good to cluster

That you should not put too much on the schedule people want to connect with each other above everything